Boss bear – About the boss fight and the design of the bears appearance.
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In the game that we are making, the bees are rushing to their hive to save it from a bear that is attacking it. Completing the first level lets you play the boss fight with the bear. One of my tasks in developing the game is to design the looks of the bear and animate it.  The mechanics of the boss fight is that the bear open and closes its mouth, and when shooting honey in the bears mouth the bear is just going to eat the honey and won’t take any damage. The player needs to aim at its eyes. The bear strikes at the bees with its paws at times, defeating the bees that are hit in the strike and they will fall down. Once one paw disappears you know that it will strike at the bee swarm. It can strike from any direction, even from above and behind the bees. When I designed the visuals of the bear, I strived for a simple bear seen from the side. But having the other eye show as well was for allowing me to give the face more expression. I wanted it to have a malicious or sly look. I have experienced earlier when doodling that having thick eye lids is useful to make expressions. They work in about the same way as eyebrows when it comes to forming a facial expression. They can make a character look sad, angry, tired, or as in this case sly, depending on what way they tilt and how much. It was important that the bear didn’t look scary, because it would be weird since the rest of the game is cute, silly and cartoony. That is the reason behind the bears blunt teeth that more looks like human teeth rather than a realistic bears.
When I had sketched a few different bears in my notebook, I felt more secure on drawing bears. So I started sketching in photoshop and playing around a bit with the mouth-opening mechanic so that it would look good both mouth closed and opened. When I felt satisfied with the sketch I wanted approval from my team on my design before developing it further, because I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on a design that we weren’t going to use.
Showing this to my team, they approved the design but asked me to open its mouth even more. Since it is a mechanic in the boss fight but also it would fit with the cartoon style of the game. So I did that and also made the finished line art. I also made the frames that would be in between the opened mouth and closed mouth so that it would make a smoother animation, but more about the animation in another blog post. The reason the paws are not attached to the body is because we needed them as separate sprites. In Unity they are animated on their own and can move in any thinkable way. They can attack in ways that aren’t possible, like from above for an example. Some think that is funny, some think that it is stupid. However, my personal opinion is that it makes the boss fight more unpredictable and fun. As well as it contributes to the bears character of being sly and also cartoony.
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